By Teresa Rivas

The speculation ahead of the Twitter IPO continues: Today Hillside Partners analyst Rory Maher put out a note, writing that he values the company between $13 billion and $17 billion.

Maher writes that that figure comes from “a variety of revenue growth and EBITDA margin forecast scenarios,” and that he thinks it’s reasonable to expect annual revenue growth between 30% and 50% through 2017. He also thinks EBIDTA margins will be between 20% and 30% by that year, as the company boosts its advertising rates.

Maher warns that investors shouldn’t expect Twitter to become as big as Facebook (FB), as its audience will likely remain significantly smaller. Nonetheless, he sees opportunities for growth as the company woos larger advertisers and launches new mobile and video products next year. He also notes that the fact that Twitter only allowed advertisers by invitation through the first quarter this year “has likely limited the amount of ad revenue it has been able to generate thus far,” allowing for future ramp ups.

More of his thoughts below:

We expect Twitter to significantly market its Amplify TV ad product to TV advertisers in 2014, partnering with broadcast networks in selling packages to agencies. We believe CBS is likely to start selling Amplify packages for Twitter in 4Q13/1Q14, gaining momentum throughout 2014. We expect other broadcast networks to partner with Twitter on Amplify by the end of 2013, setting the stage for a full, formal launch with broadcast networks in 2014.

We believe the acquisition of MoPub in 3Q13 should enable the Company to better monetize its mobile data on apps and websites off of its own property and sell more mobile ads on its own app.

We believe that even if demand for Twitter ad products grows, the potential size of the Company’s overall business is limited by the relatively small size of its audience compared to other social networks and large publishers. For example, we estimate Twitter reaches 218M monthly users versus 1.15B. In addition, only 22% (50M) of its users are from the U.S., where ad rates are exponentially larger than CPMs overseas.

Twitter stated in its S1 that its fastest-growing regions in the near/medium term would likely be Argentina, France, Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. In our opinion, this could limit the overall Company’s revenue growth in addition to the size of the overall business since we believe many international ad markets are years behind the U.S. in terms of the maturity of the digital ad market.

On Monday SunTrust Robinson Humphrey was the first firm to come out with a price target on Twitter, at $50.

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